Ultimately I think that my favorite film genre is That Really Great Film I Saw on TV Last Night But I Can’t Remember the Title or Who’s In It.

If you have even a modest reputation as a film buff you become the go-to guy whenever someone wants to be reminded of the name of an actress in an obscure ’30s film, or what won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1978, or the title of a film that they saw on TV late last night that they had never heard of but turned out to be really, really good. When the person asks me about these kinds of films, I get really excited to. Confronting a blank slate, one’s mind paints on it all the inchoate images that you have always wanted to see in a film. A few hints and scraps from the confused viewer open up a vast terrain at the end of which is cinematic valhalla.

What’s always puzzled me, though, is why can’t people remember the titles of movies they just saw last night? When they come to me with these queries in the old days, before the Internet and the IMDB, I could never find the answer. Now, of course, I can usually find the answer in a few seconds and take all the credit from backward people who still haven’t caught on to the vast resources of the world wide web.

Among the aides du memoires that have proved handy is the Criterion Collection, which has solved two puzzles. Backs in the 1980s an elderly couple of anglophiles were extolling the virtues of a film they’d seen the night before, one starring Alec Guinness as a lonely soldier. They remembered it as having a title like Paths of Glory, Something of Glory. Since one could not at that time look up a title by its last word, I could never find it in skimpy Guinness filmographies. Later they asked me about a British thriller they thought was called The Green Light or The Green Ray, with Alaistar Sim. It’s too late to tell them now, but the real titles were Tunes of Glory, a CC release of a few years ago, and Green for Danger, due out from Criterion on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007, for $39.95. Green for Danger proves to be every bit as fun as they elders proclaimed.

Directed by Sidney Gilliat and released in 1946, Green for Danger is a murder mystery in a wartime medical setting.

The narrative begins precisely, with an exterior image of a postman on deliveries struggling up a hill. The at-first unidentified narrator says that the time is August the 17th 1944. Then in the very next sequence, this narrator points out that of a group of doctors and nurses and a patient in a surgery theater, three of them will be dead in the course of a few days.

The point of the dateline precision is to tell the audience that the story is taking place at the height of the German V-1 bomb campaign against the British. Known as the “Vergeltungswaffe” or reprisal weapon, and known colloquially as a doodlebug and buzz bomb, among other names, these were pilotless missiles bearing a large payload, the aircraft flying until it ran out of gas and then tumbled to the earth, where it destroyed random locations. About 10,000 were launched against Great Britain between June 12th, 1944, and March 29, 1945, killing at least 6, 000 people and injuring an additional 18, 000.

In the context of Green for Danger, the buzz bombs add to the air of tension and assault as doctors work on casualties at a military hospital. One patient brought in is Higgins (Moore Marriott), the postman. He seems particularly alarmed by two of his helpers, the anesthesiologist Dr. Barnes (Trevor Howard), who has a black mark in his past, and a nurse (Megs Jenkins), whose voice frightens him. When he dies on the operating table, his demise is viewed at first as another mishap of war, but later when one of the nurses falls apart in public and announces that Higgins’s death was the result of murder, and then is herself killed, outside help arrives in the form of Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim ) from Scotland Yard.

That Inspector Cockrill doesn’t make his presence known in the film until about 37 minutes in (though, it turns out, he is also that narrator), and that when we do meet him is a blend of buffoonishness and arrogance are among the many signs that this is an anti-detective film. It’s not told in a conventional manner and the presumed detective “hero” is a very unlikable man.

The first forty minutes is a whole lot of backstory. We learn that one nurse, Marion Bates (Judy Campbell) still carries a torch for Lothario Dr. Eden (Leo Genn). Bates is a character in Mrs. Danvers mode, with arched eyebrows that pierce the screen with contempt and suspicion. Nurse Esther Sanson (Rosamund John) feels guilty for leaving her mother behind to be bombed by a V-1, and nurse “Freddie” Linley (Sally Gray) is trying to weasel out of an engagement to the hyper-jealous Barnes.

Into this hash of Earl Grey’s Anatomy, walks Cockrill, who revels in making his suspects nervous and in causing fist fights between them. With his slouch hat and recklessly wielded cane, he is frightening, and Sim was a scary actor to begin with, several notches up from Boris Karloff in his capacity for physical ghastliness. In Gilliat’s vision, Cockrill ends up less being Columbo than Clouseau.

Gilliat, co-writing the script with Claud Gurney from a novel by Christianna Brand, one of the pseudonyms of Mary Milne, skirts many reservations from the British censorship board in almost operations and presenting the doctors as a randy bunch. And shot almost wholly in the Rank studios, the film has a beautiful controlled, British noir look, of wind-swept groves and little streams gushing through small rolling hills, of long hallways and small doors whose windows frame the odd corpse, a visual style that evokes Val Lewton’s movies. It’s a fantastic look and well worth a viewing in and of itself. As a parody of detective fiction, Gilliat starts out encouraging his actors to act as suspiciously as possible, with guilt-proclaiming glances at each other, but soon the film settles down and takes itself and its story seriously.

Green for Danger is a real find, one which Criterion has plucked out of its Janus Films catalog. It was previously released in the early 1990s as a laser disc, and one of the supplements is Bruce Eder’s audio commentary track from that disc. It’s a highly informative account of the film, its makers and its stars, who are likely to be unknown to most viewers given the general lack of attention to British post war cinema from anywhere else besides Criterion. Eder concludes that Gilliat wanted to parody the detective genre, but instead made “one of the best ever.”

Gilliat enjoyed a 30-year partnership with Frank Launder that took them from film scripts such as The Lady Vanishes to a series of popular success in the mid-1960s. New to the disc is a 14-minute video interview with Geoff Brown, the author of books on both Launder and Gilliat and Michael Balcon, and he walks the viewer through a thumbnail account of Gilliat and Launder’s career and points out some telling details about Green for Danger itself. In addition there is a 20-page booklet with cast, crew, chapter tiles, transfer info, and an essay by Geoffrey O’Brien and a brief statement by Gilliat, taken from Brown’s book. The static, musical menu offers 21-chapter scene selection. The disc is a fine account of an unusual film from an interesting period of film history.

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